Jim Richardson

Lucky! Just Plain Lucky!

Well, there's luck, good luck and then there's just plain dumb luck.  (And, by the way, I'll take all the blind dumb luck I can get if it looks like this.)

We got the latter when we turned the corner in Kirkwall, Orkney  a couple of weeks ago and saw the poor bloke wrapped up on a light pole by the harbor. 

We'd just picked up David Schloss at the airport to begin a few days of shooting. David had never been to Orkney and wasn't exactly sure why we had brought him all this way to a tiny band of islands out on the far northeast edge of Scotland. ("Couldn't we do some great photography a little closer to Edinburgh?",  he seemed to be thinking.)

Then we saw the "blackening".  This uniquely Orcadian (as Orkney folk call themselves) tradition takes the bachelor party to bizarre extremes.  The lads collar the hapless groom-to-be, drench him in treacle or some other gooey concoction and ride him around town for several hours on the back of a lorry (that's a truck to us) with scant respect for his dignity. Strapping him to a light pole with package wrapper seems to be an innovation of breathtaking brilliance. The lads are clever, even if they are drunk.

I'd seen a blackening years before when I photographed Orkney for National Geographic.  But this was over the top. His fiancee was putting on the public face of sympathy but I suspect she was having an inner laugh all the while.

And David was instantly convinced! We had come to the right place. He's a full blown fan of Orkney now. He couldn't get enough video and I had the trusty D3X cranked up. (Nothing like capturing scenes like this in really high resolution. When you see something like this is 24 megapixels really enough?)

It was a great way to start our travels. You'll be able to see more of our trip through Scotland and Whisky Country when David has his soon-to-be-posted Aperture workflow video posted on MacCreate, here:  http://maccreate.com/    

And keep your eye for the next blackening you see. You should be so lucky. But then you'd have to be in Orkney. 

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Simple Solutions: When most of the light is right

There's a lot of light in the world! How about that for a gratuitous truism? But it's true, nonetheless, and I see a whole lot of photographers putting in a lot of work into lighting scenes that don't really need lighting. Well, at least they don't need a LOT of lighting. The light just needs a little tweaking.
This scene up in the warehouse of the Highland Park distillery in Orkney is a pretty good example. I was lucky and the good folks at Highland Park agreed to let me photograph the endless stacks of Highland Park casks snoozing away the years in their long wait to become one of the great whiskies of the world. I love getting into a whisky warehouse. The scene is always redolent of age and time, with dusty casks lined up into the distance. And then there is the aroma. Oh, my gosh! The "angel's share" slapped me in the face as we stepped inside. I stood there in a daze for a few minutes, just soaking it all in. Wow!

Finally I came back to my senses and got back to the job -- taking pictures. Usually warehouses are dim and this one was no exception. There were some small skylights but overall the light level was not too high. But it's important to distinguish between low light, which with enough exposure can be quite pretty, and bad light. This wasn't bad light. Overall it was quite soft and moody, just what I needed. But it needed a little help. Just an accent, maybe a little warmth someplace and it would all be quite nice. I could have gotten out the lighting kit, and started place strobes all over the place. I could have put a gold umbrella up front on the man pushing the cask. Then gone on back and added strobes amongst the rows of casks to light the background. Done a ratio fill on the other casks here in the front row. Just lit the heck out of it. And there are times when I would have done just that, depending on the job and what the picture needed to look like.
I didn't do that. Here's what I did. I asked them to leave the warehouse door open so some light could come in illuminating the front row of cask. Since it was a sliding door I could vary the amount of light so I didn't overpower the background light too much. Then I added my accent. I asked Kathy, my mostly patient wife, to hold my gold reflector in the sunlight outside and send a shaft of golden light onto the man with cask. It was just amazing how it brought the scene to life. I put my camera on a tripod and waited until he held still for a moment and shot the picture. Total time for setup? About three minutes. That's important. You don't always get unlimited time in a location. And your subjects often have limited patience. For the first fifteen minutes they are are a bundle of energy. After an hour of waiting for you to fiddle with yet another lighting option their eyes are dead and their feet are dragging. There are lots of ways to shoot a bad picture and that's one of them. I know because I've done a lot of bad pictures in my time.

Besides that, if you get into some place like a distillery you are going to have limited time, a couple of hours, maybe. In that time you'll want to shoot about six locations and get 10 to 15 pictures out of it. You might have to do a full lighting job somewhere along the line. If so, then get on with it. Just don't expect to get unlimited time to go all out on every picture.

It's really important to have a bunch of simple solutions in your arsenal.

Jim

Posted via email from jimrichardson's posterous

Vigil at the Stones: Frame 9,068

©National Geographic Society

Frame 9,068 came at around 2:30 a.m.

There by myself amongst the timeless standing stones of Callanish, I kind of lost track of time. The night's calm was as powerful as the stones. Around midnight, as the last of midsummer's light in these northern latitudes faded into a deep blue in the north, I thought:  I don't need to be rushing around. I can stay here all night.

In the nearby village I could hear the occasional barking dog and an unexplained sound that I eventually attributed to the earth adjusting itself to the passage of time.

It was peaceful. I was peaceful.

With that peace came the inner time to work on this picture -- to really stretch my seeing and try to bring something to a photograph of a place that has been photographed countless times before (including by me).

After all, it's not like I was seeing something new that nobody had ever seen before.  These stones were put up by the local folk sometime around 2900 BC.  That's before Stonehenge!  Without doubt there were spiritual structures here before the stones.  Before that, this place had been sacred for a very long time.

Edge of the World: Frame 10,525

©National Geographic

This is the story of frame number 10,525. 

I took 14,976 pictures for my coverage of the Hebrides Islands of Scotland, and frame 10,525 is the one that made it to the opening spread of Edge of the World  in the January issue of National Geographic Magazine. 

From the time I wrote my original Hebrides proposal, through the research and photography in the field, and finally to hammering out layouts at headquarters in Washington, D.C.,  I faced myriad paths and detours, each offering possibilities and failings.  Out of this maze of blind luck and essential insight came one moment, one photograph, that somehow rose to claim the layout's prime position on the story's opening page.  

Today and in the days to come, I'm going to tell stories about all the pictures in the Hebrides story, detailing the circumstances that brought each to the page.  Some stories will be about photographic technique; more likely I'll be talking about walking the knife edge of the creative process, with success and ecstasy on one side and failure and doom on the other.

It is this uncertainty  -- and hope -- that drives me every day I'm in the field. 

- - -

There was a reason I was on a ridge overlooking the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye.  It was because of the story proposal to National Geographic that I had written 2 1/2 years ago.  I could almost recite it by heart.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

"For countless millennia the North Atlantic has raged and stormed against the oldest exposed rocks in the world.  This epic battle has forged one of the world’s great archipelagos, a brave band of islands, battered and scarred on the outer front lines, towering and defiant in the inner keep, by turns alluring and heartless, yet always revered for their sheer tenacity. 

"It is landscape in places, seascape in others. Fjords slice deep into the towering mountain islands while the low-lying islands remain barely afloat, waterlogged and pock-marked with thousands of lochs.  Names betray the races of men who have tried to claim them:  Barra and Eriksay, Coll and Tiree, the Uists, and our romantic favorite, The Isle of Skye. On his island sojourn composer Felix Mendelssohn was enchanted by what he saw and he wrote a haunting overture.  What else could he call it?

"The Hebrides."

So:  With a few words, long before I had ever set foot in Scotland to begin shooting, I had fixed a very specific idea in the minds of National Geographic editors.  I had to come back with an image that showed that idea.  It had to look wild, a bit primordial, with great geologic forces at work, fresh and alive, like some battle being waged by the rocks.  A pretty landscape wouldn't do -- not for the story's opening spread. Grandeur would be all right, but the image also needed a raw-toothed, almost brutal, quality to it.  It need to speak to the Earth's monumental forces at work.